Slashdot Mirror
Perl Is Undead
Ptolemarch writes At the Yet Another Perl Conference beginning today in Orlando, the first keynote squarely blamed Slashdot for starting the "Perl is Dead" meme in 2005. Let's be clear: if Perl was ever dead, it must now be undead. If you can't be at YAPC, you can still watch it live.
Congregation: $_
Pastor: $_.
It means that the uninfected humans have to shoot it in the head. Or stake it through the heart. And quickly, before things get worse.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
I don't think we're ever going to get as clear of an example of the second system effect as Perl 6. If you asked me back in 2005 if I thought it was going to take more than a decade for the next Perl version bump, I would have said no way. Now I'm wondering if Larry and company shouldn't just ditch Perl 6 and come out with Perl 7, that is basically just Perl 5 with some tweaks to make complex data structures less of a nightmare and better integrate the object model, plus some tweaks around the edges like the implicit /x switch on regular expressions.
I read the internet for the articles.
Maybe Perl isn't completely "dead", but it sure as fuck isn't as vibrant of a scene as it once was.
In the 1990s, Perl was THE BIG THING . It was cool. It was trend-setting. It was what let average programmers and sys admins become superheroes, and it let good and great programmers and sysadmins become ABSOLUTE GODS .
Knowing Perl was what got you jobs. Knowing Perl was what let you get the hard work done fast. Knowing Perl was essential. If you didn't know Perl, you were SHIT IN A URINAL .
Perl's got some fierce competitors now. Python can do everything Perl can do, but with a way cleaner syntax. Ruby isn't as capable as Perl or Python, but it has a religious aspect to it that makes some hipsters go absolutely batshit crazy for it. Perl just can't compete against them.
Yeah, Perl isn't dead, and there are a lot of people who still use it today. But let's not kid ourselves, it's not the 1990s. It's not the GLORY DAYS OF PERL , when it ruled the roost.
Meanwhile, Perl 5 being phased out of system building / admin tools and web frameworks. Even Perl 5 is dying.
Not for me, I write new Perl 5 code all the time. Get some real useful work done with it too.
some people still write new COBOL too
sure, can write good stuff with it, but it is passing
I don't think there's a second-system effect going on with Perl 6. Every two or three years some new team has come along and tried to implement it, only to totally fail and produce nothing usable. These people didn't implement Perl 5, so I don't think we can say that Perl 6 is a second attempt for them.
These Perl 6ers have just continually done stupid shit with half-assed virtual machines and intermediate languages, rather than getting real work done.
For fuck's sake, just look at the approaches that have always worked in the past:
- Perl 5 and earlier: An interpreter written in C.
- Python: An interpreter written in C.
- Ruby: An interpreter written in C.
- Lua: An interpreter written in C.
- Tcl: An interpreter written in C.
- PHP: An interpreter written in C.
- UNIX shells: Interpreters written in C.
The lesson should be crystal-fucking-clear: write an interpreter in C. That's all the Perl 6ers need to do, but for some reason they just won't do it.
No more Parrot. No more crap written in Haskell. No more stupid intermediate languages. The Perl 6ers just need to cut out the crap, and do things right for a change.
Shall we drag out all the other obfuscated code contests and judge all languages guilty by the most heinous crimes committed with them? Remember that C and C++ give us Windows.
You can write C-code obscurely too. But, somehow, Perl seems to encourage this sort of thing... 20 years ago my CS-professor dismissed Perl as a "write-only" language — since then my conviction of him being right has only grown.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Most of the scripts/programs that I still use that are written in perl, truly are 'zombie processes', waiting to be put out of their misery.
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
So a few years ago, a bunch of people decided that there was no point in waiting for Perl6, and started back porting the features they liked into Perl5.
And to deal with the whole issue of the Perl6 syntax not being compatible w/ Perl5, they've added 'use feature' where you can tell it which features to enable. (or specify a version number to turn on a whole bunch of things)
So, you want postfix dereferencing? Then use perl 5.20, and enable the feature. (although, I believe it's currently enabled via 'experimental', so people know they're enabling a feature that may change)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Perl 5.20 was just released and "represents approximately 12 months of development since Perl 5.18.0 and contains approximately 470,000 lines of changes across 2,900 files from 124 authors."
That doesn't seem to bad to me, but I'm not sure how that number of core release authors compares to other languages like Python or Ruby.
Meanwhile, it's apparent that slashdot itself uses Perl e.g: http://slashdot.org/job_board....
What's the difference between a hipster and a Perl hipster?
A hipster liked it before it was cool and doesn't now. A Perl hipster liked it when it was cool, and still does.
Same here. The great thing about Perl is not all the things you can do with it, but all the things you don't have to do because there is CPAN module that already does what you want. IMHO, the most important characteristic of a language is its' usefulness and Perl is very useful indeed.
Meanwhile, Perl 5 being phased out of system building / admin tools
Really? what's replacing it? (genuine question ... I haven't seen anything that really fills that niche as effectively nor as completely)
Perl 5 is still charging full steam ahead in every sysadmin group I've been around. I know there are python advocates out there, but I have only encountered ONE major IT shop that is completely (or nearly so) python driven (and it happens to be Guido's employer -- hardly a good example). Other than that, the most I've seen is _some_ python but _mostly_ perl in any IT shop.
Sure, language-geeks have been talking about what other language has done a better job of being "a language" for at least 10 years ... but really, anything you can say negatively about perl can be said about bourne shell programming. And, yet, not only did bourne shell dominate *nix sysadmin and package install programming for 25+ years, but it is _still_ being done out there, by some backward luddite sysadmins. Perl has only been dominant in the sysadmin space for less than 15 years ... I wouldn't be surprised if it lasts at least another 10 more. And, really, since it lacks many of bourne shell programming's problems, it'd be reasonable to expect it to keep going for a lot longer than that. Especially as perl 5's evolution continues to slow down and become more stagnant (creating a consistent and stable programming layer ... which has not been true through the entirety of perl 5's lifespan -- there were a few major hiccups there as various sub-systems were refined or changed).
(to be clear, perl 5 has _existed_ for more than 15 years, but it didn't become really dominant as a sysadmin language of choice, finally eclipsing bourne shell, until the very late 1990's or early 2000's ... probably about the time that y2k issues wiped out anything too old to have/support perl, and the last of many *nix vendors and most linux distro's being sure they included perl in their boilerplate installation, pretty much removing bourne shell's one major claim to fame (ubiquity).)
In fact, I like it more now that it _isn't_ cool!
More telling is how utterly fast Perl is compared to the other languages. I've run most of the sample files from this language shootout and had remarkably similar results to what they list there.
The Perl version performed on par with the C and C versions, and it's growth/memory usage stayed pretty consistent throughout. The other languages were horrid. They took much longer, and their memory usage grew significantly during the run.
I use Perl still when doing scripting tasks. I love Perl, always have. I don't, however, necessarily think it's the right choice for building a medium to large web-based application any more. Sure the performance is there, and there are some great frameworks like Catalyst and Dancer, but to me, they still feel a bit antiquated to some of the other technologies I've used. Plus installing tons of CPAN modules can get a little trying at times.
Especially considering that the Linux job market is red-hot, and almost all Linux sysadmin job listings I see list Perl as a wanted skill. What exactly causes a language to be declared dead, anyway? Would you say that Fortran or Cobol are dead? Because they are still going strong in their respective niches.
Perl may not be "dead", but it's dead to me.
Does Deprecated mean ANYTHING? I used to write Perl programs, some 20 years ago, it was the thing. I wrote thousands of lines of KSH scripts too at that job. Perl it got replaced by a different tool, not that the new tool is better, but because it was new, just like KSH, CSH and BASH are no longer the tools of choice.
As you young whipper snappers exit my lawn, I offer you the following tidbit of knowledge : "Learn from what happened to Perl, and learn as many tools as you can. Where it's not the tools that make the programer good or bad, having the right tool in your toolbox can make a good programer a great one. Be the great one."
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Like I said, I haven't seen python take over anywhere other than Google. That's a big claim to fame, surely. But, it's not as wide spread as it could or should be, at this point in python's life, IMO. It just doesn't have the momentum nor clear advantage (to non-language-geeks) over perl to push it forward fast enough to overtake perl.
I do like python, mind you. I just think it's stuck in the betamax / BSD niche (academically superior to its cousins, but stuck in second place for reasons that have nothing to do with its academic superiority ... because academic superiority doesn't win any races outside of academia).
I agree that this (truncated) example is terrible, but it's clearly obfuscation for obfuscation's sake. If you manually insert whitespace and newlines, the above example is easy to read except for a few deliberate obfuscation techniques like hard-to-follow operator chaining and nested assignment.
Most modern languages allow operator chaining, so things like "$t ^= $c ^= (...) " are not a problem with perl per-se. To make this more readable, all you have to do is decompose it into its component operators, following the rules of operator precedence: "{ $c ^= (...); $t ^= c; }". Most modern languages also allow nested assignment, so things like "if ((@a = ...)[20] & 48)" are allowed. Again, if you want to make it more maintainable, you can write it as: "@a = ...; if (@a[20] & 48)". Once we've removed those types of issues from your example, you're only left with issues related to lack of pretty-printing (includes the fact that nobody but Larry Wall truly understands perl's operator prededence rules), and some surprising things that happen because of implicit variables and dynamic scoping.
IMHO perl's greatest fault is that there is no round-trip-capable pretty-printer. If Perl shipped with a pretty-printer, and if that pretty printer included an option to explicitly parenthesize operators and insert omitted implicit variables, then people could use the tool to read and understand poorly-written perl-snippets, and the only real fault left would be the fact perl uses dynamic scoping by default.
Same here. I am a freelance Perl programmer and for the past 12+ months have been very busy with coding in ... Perl. More so than when Perl was considered the "glue that holds the web together". And no, it isn't maintenance of old code.
A number of people who left Perl and declared it dead are the ones that couldn't program in Perl to begin with (never learnt the language, thought it could be learned by trial and error), and most likely still can't in whatever they consider fashionable right now.
Perl Programmer for hire
But did Netcraft confirm it?
Personally I prefer "half-dead" or "quasi-dead". Does that make me a pessimist?
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
wouldn't that be a Perl under the shell?
*ducks*
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Most of the time you're maintaining code you're maintaining bad code, though, and it's pretty rare that I run across a perl program with "use strict" turned on. But if I don't see it, I at least know what I'm up against. The newer languages need a similar "A bad programmer wrote this" flags.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
That and the Perl community is good about taking upstream patches, has CPAN and a faster, cleaner implementation. Ignoring syntax, Python's got some ugly code in the implementation and it's touchy and irritating to port.
I actually got into Perl because I tried to port Python and Ruby. When you see what's under the hood, it really makes you love Perl. I've migrated from PHP to Perl for scripts and web stuff in the last few years and I find it much less frustrating. The problem is no longer how am i going to get this to work, but which CPAN module do I want to use to do it.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
A language that is expressive enough to allow you to write code that is concise and understandable (but no more concise. Cutting out verbosity is only good when it improves legibility) is going to give you enough of a dialect to make some truly twisted and illegible statements that are, nevertheless, still valid code.
I don't think we should blame the language for being powerful enough that an evil programmer can be unfathomably evil, if it also enables a just programmer to be eminently understandable.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Is it dead? Well, some quick scripting can tell us the truth, using Bash and of course Perl.
On my Ubuntu notebook and main machine:
sudo find /etc /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin -type f -executable -exec file -b "{}" \; \ /script/; /(shell|python|ruby|perl|bash)/i ) {
| perl -MData::Dumper -nle '
next unless
if (
$types{$1}++
}
else {
warn "Other: $_\n"
};
END {
print Dumper(\%types);
}'
Output:
Other: a /usr/bin/make -f script, ASCII text executable
Other: a nickle script, UTF-8 Unicode text executable
Other: awk script, ASCII text executable
$VAR1 = {
'perl' => 283,
'python' => 104,
'bash' => 1,
'Ruby' => 3,
'ruby' => 9,
'shell' => 602
};
On a server:
Other: a /bin/dash script, ASCII text executable
$VAR1 = {
'Python' => 36,
'Perl' => 139,
'shell' => 267
};
Looks very much alive. Unless of course, Perl realized what it was calculating and cheated and made it's own numbers up on the fly...
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... it's just the way people use it.
Perl was designed as a powerful, flexible, loosely typed scripting language for munging text files and streams, and that's exactly what it is.
It's great for those scripts that you write for a particular task and never use again after the few days it was necessary. It's also good for writing glue code on occasion, to tie the inputs and outputs of other applications together, and when shell scripting just won't quite cut it.
The trouble was that it was such a useful scripting language people started writing applications in it. Then they had to jump on the object-oriented bandwagon, which was done clumsily. Sort of like gluing a dog to your horse so it can fetch. And yes, it can be difficult to read, but it doesn't have to be.
Use Perl for the tasks it was originally designed for. If you're going to write real applications, use a more appropriate language. Don't kick your dog because he can't sing.
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
All traction was lost when Perl 6 became some amorphous goal, and nobody gives a damn any more. Personally, I think this is a shame -- but I've found Python and Ruby to be more-than-acceptable replacements. (Honestly, I think Ruby is the cat's pajamas, aside from regex speed on 100+ MB logfiles.)
So... does Perl wish to make a comeback? It really would be fairly easy:
1) Have Larry Wall take the reins well-and-truly again.
2) Give a timeframe for a for-real reference release of Perl 6. Not this sort of wish-wash "everything that says it's Perl 6 *is* Perl 6" thing. Choose *one* of the projects, and have it be the reference against which all others are measured.
3) Give direction and make it public. While associated clearly with #1, merely taking the reins won't do the job -- it has to be clear that Perl is *GOING* somewhere, and not just stagnating. And this has to be made known.
There are plenty of sysadmins who learned Perl when it was 5.x, and who have fond memories of it. Give them something more than memories to work with, and you may well go somewhere. As it is? I just couldn't be bothered to care. Gimme Ruby.
Just my personal experiences. Back in 90s I was working for BBN Planet, in a group monitoring network traffic within AS1 (which is *us*). I have inherited a set of tools written in Perl which I had to maintain. Prior to that I had some moderate experience with Perl. So, when I started going through the code, I've found it sufficiently obfuscated to give me a head ache. I guess my predecessor was one of those "Perl kids who like to have fun", not understanding that production environment means, among other things, readability and maintainability. OK, fine. Roughly at the same time the administrator of multiple machines running that code (I think it was Solaris) decided to move from Perl 4 to Perl 5. That broke lots of scripts. So I decided to save time, found out what the functional specs were (from those who actually used those tools) and rewrote lots of the code just from the scratch. Because I was under some serious time pressure, I didn't care too much about either readability and maintainability either. Just to get something out of the doors, and - let my successor suffer just as I did.
Well, BBN Planet, as we all know, is a history, but Perl, unfortunately, isn't. At least it is steadily loosing ground to Python and for reason. Cheers.
I worked in EDA/physical design and use Perl on the job everyday, with a smattering of Tcl and SCALA on the side.
C written in BCPL
Later C written in B
Later C written in NB
Most popular modern C interpreter whose key components written in CIL (an artificial object oriented assembly)
2nd most popular modern C interpreter whose key components are written in llc & lli
Perl remember originated with short system automation scripts a replacement for Sed and AWK. It wasn't uncommon for a Perl script to be one line
perl -e... in a shell script.
And then of course a replacement for shell scripting. Perl handled 20 line programs wonderfully. But what works well at 20 lines doesn't work so well at 2000 lines. Perl took on new problem domains.
Because of the lack of new projects being done with it. I can't remember the last time a [major] web site or web framework was done in Perl. It seems like the whole "ruby on rails" fad is over, but even things like Django (Python), .NET, Java, PHP, and even stuff like "Go" have stolen Perl's Thunder on the Web front.
Well what about as your standard workhorse for script kiddies? Seems like Python has cleaned Perl's clock. For me - I've been a die-hard Perl guy for 10 years. The past couple years, I've worked with many different technologies such as 2d/3d CAD projects, Blender (3d adnimation), Inkscape (2d illustration), GNU Radio, OpenStack (cloud), and even Amazon AWS [libraries]. You know what was the striking commonality to all of these? They were done in Python.
Tiny exception was in the last case (above - Amazon AWS libraries) had several different language options but had *NO* Perl options whatsoever. So the language that was once so revolutionary because of the abundance of CPAN libraries available for it starts to not have newer libraries built/ported to it. Furthermore, binding stuff to Perl can be difficult. So much so that most modern distros will make their own "Perl library" [RPMs] - and one of the reasons being is that a standard CPAN module installation won't work due to problems linking/binding/building across all these different environments with very different prerequisites. Most third party Python stuff I have acquired is most often "native python", and works across all types of exotic platforms - even on iOS and Google App Engine.
As for me - I had to switch away from my beloved Perl over to Python for the aforementioned reasons. There are still several things I miss very much - the abilities to so easily spawn and fork "helper" processes, the ease it which it integrates regular expressions, how it can manipulate files, etc. All these things *can* be done with Python, they're just integrated into Perl much better IMHO.
It seems like Perl 6 was supposed to use something similar to Java's "JVM" microcode interpreter. This could have been a possibility to run Perl in embedded sandbox-type environments (like parking meters and smartphones), but it never happened.
So, I do believe Perl is dead. I miss it for what it was, what it is, and what might have been!
I agree that this (truncated) example is terrible, but it's clearly obfuscation for obfuscation's sake. If you manually insert whitespace and newlines, the above example is easy to read except for a few deliberate obfuscation techniques like hard-to-follow operator chaining and nested assignment.
Most modern languages allow operator chaining, so things like "$t ^= $c ^= (...) " are not a problem with perl per-se. To make this more readable, all you have to do is decompose it into its component operators, following the rules of operator precedence: "{ $c ^= (...); $t ^= c; }". Most modern languages also allow nested assignment, so things like "if ((@a = ...)[20] & 48)" are allowed. Again, if you want to make it more maintainable, you can write it as: "@a = ...; if (@a[20] & 48)". Once we've removed those types of issues from your example, you're only left with issues related to lack of pretty-printing (includes the fact that nobody but Larry Wall truly understands perl's operator prededence rules), and some surprising things that happen because of implicit variables and dynamic scoping.
IMHO perl's greatest fault is that there is no round-trip-capable pretty-printer. If Perl shipped with a pretty-printer, and if that pretty printer included an option to explicitly parenthesize operators and insert omitted implicit variables, then people could use the tool to read and understand poorly-written perl-snippets, and the only real fault left would be the fact perl uses dynamic scoping by default.
The language itself moderately encourages unreadability, but I think the language itself is not the only problem. Even with pretty printers, there's a separate problem in that the perl community tends to even more strongly encourage language efficiency over code readability, and encourages leveraging the language's most powerful, but least readable syntax. That can't be pretty-printed away. In fact, in my experience self-taught perl programmers start off writing fairly readable code, if for no other reason than its easier for themselves to read their own code that way. But the more they encounter other perl programmers and other examples of perl code written by others, the more they degenerate into increasingly less readable code. Its not exactly the language itself causing that, but rather an amplification effect where its small encouragement influences a larger programming community to loop around and reinforce jettisoning syntactic candy for pure efficiency (and lose readability in the process) among its members.
You could say Perl is the tool that the Perl programming community uses to make more Perl programmers, molded in their image of absolute conciseness as one of the higher abstract goals of perl programs.
None of those dynamics have ever occurred in a Python shop?
The second half of the nineties was a bad scene for code readability all around, or did you somehow not notice the Herman Miller office furniture bubble?
There was a lot of Perl written during this era. Perl was the only language that could keep up with the Vogon rapture of all things brick and mortar. The ferryman threw in the towel, auction off his ferry on eBay, bought two cords of dynamite (mail order), and simply diverted the river. Pretty much everything was still where it had been, but traditional commerce was all on the other side now.
My development platform circa 1996 was NT 4, on a P6 200 with 32 MB of EDO system memory, a 640 MB disk drive, and a good quality 17" Dell CRT. It was tolerable, but hardly coding nirvana. The world was shifting under my feet almost daily: Linux, BSD, 2000, LBA, AMD64, SATA, DDR, broadband, Mozilla, Google, DVI, PHP, Python, Ruby, C++, STL, and not an open source version control system worth a crock of shit for love nor money.
I wonder why my coding standards at the time did not optimally favour my future self in the mid 2000s with my CoreDuo workstation, 4 GB of ram, 200 GB of disk space, and twin 19" monitors.
Do recall the little puzzle with the sliding digits 1-15 in a 4x4 grid? Trying to get any significant piece of glue code to run on NT and Linux and able to survive unscathed a major upgrade of each was a lot like that. Or have you blacked it out? Many ugly lines of code were written because the tiles were sticky. In the stupidest possible ways. And it was all going to be Ruby next year anyway. Whatever language you were working in was next up against the wall after the demise of B&M (if any wall could still be found). Soon the Wall was up against the wall, but I digress.
Programmers were in such short supply that vast numbers of people were coding in languages they only pretended to know. Have you forgotten that, too? If Visual Basic had been a better scripting language, Perl would have come out the other side better loved.
The great thing for the smart young programmers about becoming trendoids is that it helps to insulate them from the ugly job of cleaning up yesterday's bubble's giant mess.
String manipulation is the core functionality for all languages so this allows to compare languages fairly.
If that doesn't clue you in on how utterly full of shit he is, I'm not sure what will. I mean, Java Strings are immutable. This test is just about adding strings together. That's pretty much the worst possible case for trying to benchmark Java. So if you're coding Java and adding a bunch of strings together, you use a StringBuilder and not a String. Only you can go look at the source code, and whoever wrote it didn't. Not only that, but how much memory Java would use during the run would depend pretty much entirely on flags given to the JVM, because it would just keep eating up space copying the immutable String over and over until it was forced to garbage collect. And that's all just a quick inspection of the Java comparison. I am pretty confident without looking that that margin of difference between C and C++ is entirely due to pathological C++ code.
I mean really, if you think that your interpreted language is comparable to any major compiled language in performance, you're an idiot. Sabotaged test results (whether the result of duplicity or incompetence) don't change that.
You can write C-code obscurely too. But, somehow, Perl seems to encourage this sort of thing... 20 years ago my CS-professor dismissed Perl as a "write-only" language — since then my conviction of him being right has only grown.
I understand but disagree. Any language can be a write-only language if you don't care about maintainability. Then there are the wannabe gurus that save 3 lines of code not to shorten the program but to impress others. Even worse, there are people that criticise readable code for it being too simple. If you ever worked in a team of programmers with varying skills then you appreciate simple, readable code. You also will once you had to take over unreadable code.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
And another issue for me was this whole There's More Than One Way To Do It philosophy which I find extremely frustrating. Write a piece of code in 20 lines and show it on usenet. Somebody writes it in 10. Then another one pipes up in 3. Then the true Guru comes up with a one-liner that nobody can grok. And they all run faster. Maybe.
It also mean that when you read somebody else's code, you have to pattern that you can recognize. In C if I have to go through an array, you can bet there's gonna be a loop. In Perl, mystery, it could be any of multiple and rarely used constructs. The thing that made Perl popular at once was the integration of regular expressions, but we now have this in Bash =~, so why bother ?!?
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I moderated in this article, but this is something that I'd like to talk about for a bit, even if only anecdotal...
Perl 5 is still charging full steam ahead in every sysadmin group I've been around. I know there are python advocates out there, but I have only encountered ONE major IT shop that is completely (or nearly so) python driven (and it happens to be Guido's employer -- hardly a good example)
Over the past 8 years my own usage of Perl in writing code has declined to zero. There has been a mentality change over the years in the shop I work in, and where we used to grab for Perl by default as a quick'n'dirty duct-tape & MacGuyver language, we now exclusively rely on Python. I think there are several reasons for this shift.
The most prominent one to me personally is that other languages have adopted CPAN-like repositories. I don't know about the statistics of numbers of modules, active development, number of commits, etc etc, and put bluntly I really don't care. Although these statistics are interesting into disseminating how active a language is to its developers, to me as a user of the language it only matters if a module is maintained and does what its supposed to do. The thing is, for most of the things I used to use Perl modules for, I now use Python modules, and can say "Well, it's good enough".
Our development teams composition has also changed. A lot of our older generation of programmers/admins have retired or switched jobs, and a lot of younger people were hired to replace them. The younger generation is definitely more familiar with Python, Ruby and other scripting languages than it is with Perl. The incentive for learning Perl has become a lot smaller. Perl was the de facto language for many when writing a CGI script, but then RoR and AJAX happened. While over time Perl adapted (think Catalyst and Dancer) other languages have adapted as well. Look at all the wsgi applications and frameworks in Python.
Our investment in Perl itself was more of the kind where we used a set of scripts to change data from format A to B at which point our Java and/or C++ code takes over, or some tools to deal with our logs, etc. The switch to Python for these tools was gradual (but quick) process, and we found ourselves not looking back. I can't really say that we were/are heavily invested in Perl or Python, but for day to day usage Python has completely taken over. Who knows where we end up in another 8 years from now?
Lastly, if you were to go around our shop, asking people what's new about Python 3 you'll get pretty much right answers. If you go around our shop asking people what's happening with Perl 6, you will get a blank stare. I remember clearly how Perl 6 was going to become the best thing since butter on toast, ... There was general excitement about it all, and then there was a whole load of ... well... nothing. We're 11-12 years further and there's still no sign of Perl 6. What the hell happened there?
Perl has only been dominant in the sysadmin space for less than 15 years ... I wouldn't be surprised if it lasts at least another 10 more.
I don't doubt that Perl will be around for a whole lot longer. It has assembled a group of dedicated die-hard users and developers over the years, and in general it has a great community. There are older, more horrible languages that are still alive today, so I doubt Perl will be gone anytime soon.
However, while my entire post is anecdotal, I do think the Perl community is deluding itself a bit. The talk in the video (I actually listened to it in the background while working on something) mentions a lot of statistics that are interesting to the Perl developers and maintainers, but are hardly and indicator of usage or adoption. The more interesting part of the statistical talk was about the general decline of jobs available for scripting languages in favor of newer technologies, but even those statistics in general don't speak much about usage and adoption.
FWIW, may Perl be around a long long time. Having more tools at your disposal is never a bad thing.
I remember clearly how Perl 6 was going to become the best thing since butter on toast, ... There was general excitement about it all, and then there was a whole load of ... well... nothing. We're 11-12 years further and there's still no sign of Perl 6. What the hell happened there?
Don't get me wrong about this particular thing... all of my commentary is about Perl 5. I think Perl 6 is dead on the vine. I think Perl 5 will probably be the final definition of the language. It will get refined, and bug fixed, but I don't think it will get the type of complete change that Perl 6 implies (not the current concept of perl 6, nor any concept of similar scope that might replace the current perl 6 concept). Nor do I think that that's a bad thing (for Perl 5 to be final definition of the language).
I'm also not saying Perl 5 is perfect. I just think it's "good enough"* for what it does, and for use in sysadmin type development (which is not just for quick and dirty duct-tape programming ... I've written pretty extensive projects in Perl), with a momentum that will carry it forward for more than a little while.
(* nor do I consider "good enough" to be a snobbish backhanded compliment ... I mean it more in the light of "the perfect is the enemy of the good-enough" -- "good enough" gets things done, "perfect" gets defined and redefined on a white-board for an eternity and never accomplishes anything other than a bunch of bloviating) (nor am I implying that that negative version of "perfect" applies to _any_ of the other languages being discussed ... I'm just saying, "good enough" is a good thing when applied to perl 5.)
A lot of best practices for Perl are good programming practices in general. Of course there are (plenty) of exceptions, but that's the case with other languages as well. One thing one wants to avoid is to program Python in Haskell or Pascal in C, for example.
As for hard to read (for a beginner) have a look at Haskell, for example.
Python's fame is that it "reads like pseudocode". That's nice, but utterly fails if a programmer has no good feel for algorithms. Pascal used to have the same fame. A few years back I had to reimplement a Pascal program into Perl. One of the pieces of code was 100+ lines. After some studying it turned out to be a variant of bubble sort. At the end few lines reversed the sort order (!). It could be replaced with a few lines of Perl. And no, not because I write short and cryptic code. The code could've been written way shorter in Pascal as well, even when implementing a sort manually.
Perl Programmer for hire